A UX roadmap is a strategic, living artifact that aligns, prioritizes, and communicates a UX team’s future work and the problems it needs to solve. Roadmaps are successful when they make realistic promises, value functionality over pretty visuals, or are strategic documents instead of feature-specific release plans. 

Successful roadmapping include 6 key high-level steps:

1. Establish goals: Determine the purpose of your roadmap and who should be involved.
2. Gather inputs: Collect problems that need to be solved from stakeholders and existing research.
3. Create themes:  Cluster problems into into themes. 
4. Prioritize themes: Establish criteria and create a scoring framework to rank themes.
5. Visualize and share: Plot themes into a timeline and distribute the resulting visualization (your roadmap).
6. Revisit and update: Routinely return to your roadmap and make adjustments as necessary. 

Step 1: Establish Goals 

The most critical part of roadmapping occurs at the beginning.  Roadmaps must have a clear purpose, stakeholder support, and buy-in in order to be effective. 

1A. Why: Determine Your Objective 

The first question to ask is:  What is the primary purpose of this roadmap? A roadmap can have different goals:  

• Increase team awareness
• Enable crossdisciplinary visibility and alignment 
• Educate others on the UX process 
• Manage bandwidth and resource allocation  
• Show to stakeholders what problems you aim to solve
• Prioritize future work 
• Define a UX vision 
• Identify a minimum viable product (MVP) 

Roadmaps can become political, complex artifacts. A single, primary purpose for your roadmapping initiative will keep it focused and will establish clear priorities (for example, what information to communicate, who is involved in the process, or the tool the roadmap lives in). 

1B. What: Identify a Scope

Determine the scope of your roadmap. Roadmaps that include UX work can have 3 scopes: product, discipline, and specialty. Identify which scope is best for your objective. If you will create a discipline or specialty roadmap, clearly establish what product(s) the roadmap will serve. Both these types of roadmaps roadmaps can visualize work across several products within a portfolio (the broadest approach) or across just one specific product-area within a single product (the lowest-granularity approach). 

1C. Who: Establish a Core Team

With your primary goal and determined scope in mind, find support. Pull together a crossdisciplinary team that has insight or responsibility over the future work’s completion. Establish stakeholder support for the roadmapping initiative by educating managers or executives on the benefits of the process. Depending on the maturity of your organization (or lack thereof), you may need to explain the value of a roadmap, what you hope to accomplish, and ask these stakeholders to support the initiative among their respective groups.

Step 2: Gather Inputs 

Once you have your roadmapping objective and core team, gather potential roadmap inputs. Your goal is to acquire any information that helps identify and prioritize potential problems to solve. These potential inputs come in all shapes and sizes; don’t worry too much about what each input means for your roadmap just yet. 

Start by gathering existing artifacts related to the scope of your roadmap:

• Previous roadmaps 
• Product roadmaps (or any higher-level roadmaps) 
• Journey maps 
• Service blueprints 
• Leaderships’ strategy
• Backlogs (design or development)

In addition to the above inputs, collect any available data related to your roadmap scope: 

• Qualitative or quantitative user research 
• Customer- or employee-support logs 
• Market-research surveys or brand audits 
• Outputs from voice-of-customer (VoC) studies or client advisory board (CAB) 

The number of inputs you have will likely depend on the maturity of your organization. If you end up with largely unhelpful or untrustworthy data, consider performing stakeholder interviews (from across departments and roles) to fill gaps in your understanding as you move into step 3.  

Step 3: Create Themes 

The goal of this step is to create your roadmap’s themes. Themes represent future UX work, including areas of focus and potential initiatives. Themes are created by making a list of insights from your inputs, assessing the patterns across them, and grouping them into high-level problems to solve. This step is very similar to thematic analysis in qualitative research.

3A. Inventory Your Candidate Problems to Solve 

Look across your gathered inputs and make a list of customer (or employee) needs or problems you need to solve. The goal in this stage is to uncover potential problems from various inputs and consolidate them into a single list. 

Your list of candidate problems will be diverse. Some will be straightforward customer painpoints derived from a journey map, while others may be internal, operational requests made by employees. The goal of this stage is to condense all possible issues into a single space where they can be grouped.

3B. Assess Patterns 

Next, begin to sort candidate problems to be solved into clusters, using a technique such as affinity diagrams.  Name each cluster in a descriptive way — for example, “more data needed” or “a way for users to get help,” but  don’t worry too much about finding perfect labels. Think of this step as creating wireframes for future themes. 

Clustering facilitates discussion and alignment among roadmap creators — the goal being to arrive at a shared understanding of potential high-level problems that need to be solved. 

3C. Organize and Label

Once you have bundles of potential problems to solve, organize and label each cluster into a polished theme. Each theme needs 3 components: 

1. Beneficiary: The recipient(s) of the UX work (e.g., end users, fellow employees, or even internal stakeholders)
2. Need: The problem that will be solved (the purpose of the UX work)
3. Business objective(s): Objectives and potential outcomes (from a business point of view) that will be achieved upon completion (e.g., new market insight, user growth, increased engagement, ease of discovery, revenue)

This portion of the process takes time. If you are creating a roadmap collaboratively, discuss as a group each theme’s beneficiary, need, and business objective. Do not forget about your original inputs as you complete this step. For example, return to your roadmap goal. Be thoughtful about the vernacular you use. Ask yourself: Will the audience of the roadmap know who this beneficiary is? What broader strategies from leadership can help inform the business objectives for these themes?

Step 4: Prioritize Themes 

The next step of the process is identifying the highest-priority themes that will be mapped to the closer time horizons on the roadmap. There are several established methods to prioritize and determine which themes have the highest importance: 

• RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) scoring model 
• Critical path (prioritizing tasks within a primary flow)
• Kano model (rank items against user’s perceived value)
• ROI scorecard (prioritize based on return on investment)
• MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Will not have) scoring scheme

You can create your own prioritization model, appropriate for your needs and business goals. 

4A. Establish Criteria 

Identify a set of standardized, agreed-upon factors that help indicate a theme’s importance. The number of criteria is up to you, but aim for 4–8 factors. As a starting place, pick 2 user-oriented factors and 2 business-oriented factors. 

4B. Create a Scoring Scale

Determine a scoring scale for each criterion selected. The scoring scale can be unique to each criterion or common to all. You could, for example, use a numeric scale (e.g., from 1 to 3, with 1 being a low score). 

4C. Calculate and Rank 

Last, give each theme a score based on the criteria established. Scoring should be informed — include peers who have expertise in the established criteria to collaboratively weigh each theme. Once each theme is scored across each criterion, calculate its total score and force a rank. 

Calculation of the total scores can be as complex as necessary. For example, if one established criterion is more important than the others, you can weigh it higher in your final score. If all criteria are equally important, you can simply average the scores for each criterion to obtain the theme’s total score. 

Once you have a forced rank, collaboratively plot the top themes to the closest time horizons (Now or Next). Themes with the lowest scores should be assigned to later time horizons (Future or Future++). Loosely map each theme to a corresponding time horizon, then take a step back and assess the outcome. If you are creating a roadmap collaboratively, shift into open discussion. How does the roadmap look? Are there any gaps in your understanding? Does everyone agree with this outcome? Make adjustments as necessary until everyone feels confident and buys into the roadmap.

Step 5: Visualize and Share 

The next step of the process is deciding how to visualize and share your roadmap. The final fidelity of your roadmap should mirror what you want to achieve and who will see it. The more specific your roadmap (and smaller the audience), the lower the fidelity of your roadmap should be. Do not spend too much time polishing it. Pick a tool that everyone can easily access (probably a spreadsheet, digital whiteboard, or slide deck) and make edits within that tool. 

High-level roadmaps that are meant for stakeholders and other teams need to be higher-fidelity. In this case, create a concise, clear visual that has context, date, and a version number. 

After creating a visual (of low or high fidelity), be intentional in how you share it. Return to your original roadmapping goal to define your communication strategy. Audience, culture, and workplace formality should play a crucial role as you make decisions on when, how, and what tool you use. Has your audience seen your roadmap before? If not, be sure to spend time setting context and reiterating the goal. Consider adjusting the level of detail to fit the audience and directly ask for the kind of feedback you want upfront (for example, input on the needs, alignment across teams, or resource support). 

Step 6: Revisit and Update 

Roadmaps are living artifacts, thus should be revisited and updated on a regular basis. Upon creating your initial roadmap, establish a routine cadence for revisiting and updating. At a minimum, most roadmaps should be revisited every month. Move finished themes from Now to Completed, update themes that have had progress made, and potentially add further clarification to future themes where preliminary work has been done. As you revise and edit, be sure to save past versions — they may come in handy when showing stakeholders progress over time.    

Conclusion

Don’t be afraid to adapt this process to your needs: make it a workshop, create a hypothesis roadmap on your own then vet it with peers, or do one step a week, over the course of a month. When in doubt, always start small. Establish a clear scope and roadmap your own responsibilities. As you begin to get more comfortable with the process, involve more people and expand the practice. 

Learn more in our full-day course on UX Roadmaps at the UX Conference.